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Comment by jlarocco | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a reference about DDG using Bing?

It's not mentioned on their site, or their wikipedia entry, or anywhere else I could find, and the results were different when I tried a few searches in them both just now.

Are they "Using Bing" in the same sense they "Use Wikipedia" to put info boxes on the results page sometimes?

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"We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing"

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/

That doesn't suggest anything that the OP is saying. Google does similar things. We wouldn't say that searching DDG is like searching Stack Overflow. Or it is like searching Yelp.

There's a difference between getting results from sites that contain content (Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, Yelp) and sites that are pure search engines (Bing).

There's also a difference between reskinning a search engine and aggregating other engines' results with your own.

Sure, and AFAIK Google does neither of those, so it would be wrong to say "Google does similar things".

> AFAIK Google does neither of those

> it would be wrong to say "Google does similar things"

This does not follow.

It also isn't what I was suggesting, but it would surprise me if Google didn't look at what Bing and Yahoo were doing (and DDG).

DDG does use Bing for _some_ of their search results, but it's far from just a reskin.

_most_ of their search results. They don't give a breakdown.

DDG uses Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex for non bang searches[1].

As of October 2019, Yahoo! Search is once again “powered by Bing”[2].

To me, results are as crap as Bing's.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/6uaibg/comment/...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search

Bing is really good for porn for some reason

"Uses" is a weird word here. Because some people are suggesting that DDG is a reskin of Bing. But if we look at what DDG says[0], they talk about it the same way they talk about Stack Overflow. No one is crazy enough to say that DDG is a reskin of SO. What they are actually saying is that they are aggregating results. Which I don't understand why that would be a bad thing.

[0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/

Money quoute right here: "We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing."

SO and the other 400 sources are only used for instant boxes and other widgets. The real organic search results are all from Bing.

Full quote

> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

I'm not sure where you're getting

> The real organic search results are all from Bing.

That paragraph __DOES NOT__ say that

The paragraph clearly says that.

> more traditional links in the search results

It's super obvious to me what that refers to - the actual search results. The rest is just fluff.

Uses as some of their main sources:

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/

The results are very similar but not identical to using yahoo or bing.

I may be wrong, but I read before on HN than bing is used for 99% of the search results.

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